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Tassie, Radio Astronomy, Grote Reber
I recently visited Hobart and went out to Mt Pleasant for a look at the Uni of Tasmania's Radio Telescope observatory. They have a 26 metre antenna and the 14 metre Vela Antenna.
The 26 metre Radio dish originally came from Orroral Valley, ACT, where it was used for telemetry communications from the NASA 1960 Apollo moon missions. The 26 meter telescope is used in Australia's very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) network, which is used for high accuracy measurements including maintaining an accurate locations of:
- the centre of mass of the solar system,
- motion of the Earth's tectonic plates,
- regional deformation/uplift measurements and;
- measurements of the Earth's orientation and length of day variations.
The 14 metre scope has been used (almost) exclusively for measuring the timing of the arrival times of the Vela Pulsar, since 1981.
Also of interest was a small museum set up in memory of one of the earliest Radio Astronomers, Grote Reber (1911 to 2002). He was born in Illinois, became an Electrical Engineer, and moved into working on Karl Jansky's discovery of radio waves emanating from the Milky Way. Interestingly, his mother was an academic who also lectured Edwin Hubble, in his early days.
The museum gives a fascinating insight into Reber's life, especially since his migration to Tasmania in 1954, where he set up several antenna arrays, (the location having been chosen due to Tassie's low level of RF interference).
Interestingly, he was not a supporter of the Big Bang Theory, and he believed that Redshift was due to repeated absorption and re-emission or interaction of light and other electromagnetic radiations by low density dark matter, over intergalactic distances.
Grote Reber became a true legend in Radio Astronomy.
I'd just like to tip my hat to the University of Tasmania for making the effort to memorialise Reber's achievements, for continuing his research and thereby putting Australia on the international map in areas of crucial, fundamental Astronomical Research, especially in an environment struggling for the funding to do so.
Cheers
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